My review of "Self-Reference Engine" by Toh EnJoe is up at New Scientist/Arc:

http://arcfinity.tumblr.com/post/48842961344/were-reading-self-reference-engine-by-toh-enjoe

I read it on the plane to San Francisco and it's one of the strangest books I've ever encountered. It consistently doesn't do what a story should do. It's also full of ideas and ideas about ideas, rather than characters being characters and yet . . . it does actually affect one's thinking in ways that more conventional books rarely do.